}} Here Be Plastics |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










Here Be Plastics

        “a new continent of plastic trash…”
 
To the first human to set foot on our newest
continent only to sink knee-deep in petrochemical
muck—floundering like a stout Cortes forced
to avert his eagle’s gaze from the Pacific
to a wayward naughty pebble that nearly caused
a history-changing stumble on a peak
in Darien—and blanch at the stench of bird
and fish and mammal carcasses that have run
aground on the very materials of their extinction:
those seemingly harmless thingies that hold
together the six-packs of beer and soda
so chillingly refreshing in summer swelter,
orthose amazing containers made of sheerest yet
most tensile film that have enfolded and
transported the most desirable goodies of our
advanced civilization and have wound up
blocking the intestines of marine creatures—

To that intrepid explorer who will be first
to map the shifting terrain of tupperware,
styrofoam, tetra pak, water bottle, saran
wrap, #1-#7 recyclable in theory but dumped
in practice plasticide, coalesced by action
of sun, wind, current and tides into the
greatest manmade construct ever, an eighth
continent sure to outlast the seven previous
ones and perhaps someday combine them all
into a new supercontinent Panplasticgea:

You, and I, and our co-conspirators,
the billions of our race, are singlehandedly
responsible for this unbelievable feat
of terraforming, and as guardians of our
planet, may perhaps be unsure of whether
to be proud of our new plastic baby
or be so abjectly mortified that we ought to
go to some corner and extinct ourselves—
but let us not dwell on the psychology and
morality of this historic moment—
and instead let us say to you, brave pioneer,
as the representative of our proud,
profoundly undeserving, planet-destroying race:

CONGRATULATIONS, motherfucker